The criminal justice system in the United States has recently come under intense scrutiny. To understand and critique the system it is important to understand the broader history and processes within the system. Looking specifically at the practice of juvenile detention, we see how the system developed parallel to the cruel practices applied to adults as punishment. Juvenile detention centers were modeled on adult prisons, both reflecting nineteenth-century ideas of redemptive suffering. The consistently coercive and oppressive features of the juvenile justice system also become apparent, when looking at the system through a historic lens. In contemporary juvenile detention centers, remnants of religious influence remain in the form of prison ministry programs. Throughout an examination of the historic and modern influence of evangelical Protestantism in prisons, the vulnerability of the individuals in these programs become apparent, as do the inequities within the system.

I conducted an oral history project of five women with journeys in the Christian faith who had experience working with asylum seekers and refugees in the Phoenix metropolitan area. I explore with this project the perceptions of the helping relationship through the stories of these women and how their beliefs about their faith and work inform each other to pursue meaningful connections for the benefit of others.

This project compiles data and research about the impact that reporting on traumatic events and negative feedback/backlash has on journalists' mental health. Compiled into an online blog, there are also concrete models and outlines that are formatted for both newsrooms and journalism schools to help support against the tolls these topics can take on journalists' mental health.

For my thesis project, I joined a pathway course in Game Design. The goal was to design an analog game based upon principles learned in class and through experimental gameplay. Tasked with designing different game types and provided different styles of games to test, I was able to explore and develop my own game idea, Covers.

Bridging social capital describes the diffusion of information across networks built between individuals of different social identities. This project aims to understand if the bridging ties of economic connectedness (EC), measured by data from Facebook friends and calculated as the average share of high socioeconomic status friends that an individual from a low socioeconomic status has, can be a predictor of variations in COVID-19 infection risk across Arizona ZIP code tabulation areas (ZCTAs). Economic connectedness values across Arizona ZCTAs was examined in addition to the correlation of EC to various social and demographic factors such as age, sex, race and ethnicity, educational background, income, and health insurance coverage. A multiple linear regression model was conducted to examine the association of EC to biweekly COVID-19 growth rate from October 2020 to November 2021, and to examine the longitudinal trends in the association between these two factors. The study found that the bridging ties of economic connectedness has a significant effect size comparable to that of other demographic features, and has implications in being used to identify vulnerabilities and health disparities in communities during the pandemic.